In This New Hour: Memory’s Insistence in Black Study

In June of 1945, Zora Neale Hurston wrote to W.E.B. Du Bois with a proposition. Black people needed a resting place, a burial ground of sorts, for “the illustrious Negro dead.” She feared that the absence of a tangible place to gather in communion for commemorating the brave and notable artists and intellectuals “allows our people to forget, and their spirits evaporate.” She conjured the following scene for Du Bois to imagine: “Let there be a hall of meeting, and let the Negro sculptors and painters decorate it with scenes from our own literature and life. Mythology and all. Funerals can be held from there as well.” We must not allow those whom our traditions pass through to “lie in inconspicuous forgetfulness,” she urged. Like so many before and after her, Hurston insisted that we remember.¹

This archeological and commemorative impulse is a universal aspect of human culture. However, it is distinguishably so in the tradition of black study. The call to remember is a kind of black diasporic disposition; a polemic insistence even. We need only look to Emancipation Day ceremonies of the 19th century, Negro History Week celebrations beginning in 1926, or Arthur Schomburg’s essay, “The Negro Digs Up His Past.” Indeed, our experiences of becoming a people in this new world have meant being engaged in a constant struggle against having our bodies and our memory plundered from us. For embedded in the machination of the Middle Passage and racial chattel slavery was also “the Great Amnesia,” to borrow a phrase from Hortense Spillers.² This reality has had enormous implications for black study, as well as Black Studies (thinking here of the post-1968 context). These implications are embedded in Hurston’s proposition for the Negro sculptors and artists and what they were to construct out of black literature, life, and myths. It was about worlding; crafting a new world in/on black terms, which means using what we have inherited from our individual and shared pasts. Choosing how to honor the dead also meant engaging in a process of crafting a way of being among the living. Remembrance is essential to this procedure.

Memory is not just the work of the historian. It should come into practice for all Black Studies scholars, and often, because it is an essential part of black life. It is built into the social forms of black study we inherit precisely because of the known world’s insistence on forgetting. Black study is a fundamental critique of that world, of that civilization and its particular kind of strategic remembering.³

Black studies were not unprecedented in 1968. While Black Studies as a disciplinary formation was novel to the American academy, “its content and aim were not infant.”⁴ This new meta-discipline, in and of itself, was built on the inheritance of a textual universe and repertoire of research protocols that were over one hundred years old. It was built on recovery and remembrance; getting right about the past in order to have some solid ground on which to stand for a future. While always a futuristic project, Black Studies did not emerge out of nowhere.

Let us briefly indulge some of the “Negro Firsts” in the annals of black study. There are many first texts written by black diasporic subjects in modern times. Olaudah Equiano’s slave narrative, published in 1789, was the first of its kind. Phyllis Wheatley was the first black American and woman poet to be published in the U.S. Susan Paul was the first black American to publish a biography in 1835, which she wrote about her student who died at the age of six. Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig is the first novel published by a black American, in 1859. The Freedom’s Journal, founded in 1827, was the first black newspaper. In 1841 the fugitive slave James W. C. Pennington published A Text Book of the Origin and History, Etc., of the Colored People. The American Negro Academy, established in 1896, was the first organization of black intellectuals assembling for the purposes of methodically studying the experiences of black people and publishing its work for public consumption; but more than this, for the purposes of “vindicating” the race.⁵

This special issue on “Inheriting Black Studies” is intended to model long memory; insisting that this is a core component of the intellectual protocols that form the meta-discipline we now commemorate amidst 50th anniversary celebrations across various universities. To claim Black Studies as an inheritance is to recognize that we are in possession of something passed on to us from those that came before—knowledge, struggle, modes of study and interrogation; ways of doing and being; but also, recognition of the things that happened, which shape who we are and who we can become. Memory’s insistence in black study has multiple aims—to correct the record, to describe it in the light of human truth, and to prescribe new paths forward lest we repeat the horrors (or some new iteration of them) that have visited themselves upon our past and present. Memory is a fact of blackness in more than one way. It is embedded in black flesh; a constant reminder, even to non-black people, to remember slavery. This is part and parcel of a shared, global antipathy for black life—this insistence on memory.

The authors assembled in this special issue, most of whom are junior scholars, have taken time to remember and situate their scholarship within the lineage(s) of intellectual protocols that we inherited from scholars that came before us. Following 1968, scholars created Black Studies protocols with a new level of intentionality; modes of study that we can look back on and interrogate how they have marked the scholarship we are able to produce today and the questions we continue to work through. While the world (and the academy) insists that we demonstrate novelty, always, we know that there continues to be first questions that drive Black Studies.⁶ These are perennial questions; those that persist precisely because anti-blackness continues to be a structuring antagonism of the known world. How does it feel to be a problem? What’s the relationship between stolen people and stolen land? Is acting in the interest of capital always at odds with the project of black freedom? Or simply—Why Black Studies? We study these questions, and others, through the voices of Black people because we know that there are things that can be known from a black perspective that cannot be known from any other perspective.

The contributors in this volume resist the urge to be taken over by the charm of novelty and invention. Instead we reflect on inheritance and the traditions that work through us. We name and hone the protocols we have picked up from the Black Studies tradition to confront questions that have chosen us; those that mark us; and the ones to which we turn and face simply because it is necessary. All the while, we work and gather in communion, to study; our footnotes as a Black Studies burial ground. We visit with those that have passed on, whose spirits and ideas live on through the tools they left behind for us to perfect and reconfigure. The mere memory of them insisting that the master’s tools were not the only ones deployed for building and disassembly.

Refusing an “inconspicuous forgetfulness,” we come together at Hurston’s “hall of meeting” to gather with those who are yet among us studying and remembering and imagining. In order to live, we visit the dead. All that this tradition might be passed on. We lift every voice and sing. The voices of the dead and unheralded, as well as our own; the old and the new as an unchained, ongoing ensemble.

Jarvis R. Givens
Harvard University
Joshua B. Bennett
Dartmouth College

About the Guest Editors

Jarvis R. Givens is an assistant professor of education and an affiliate faculty in the department of African & African American Studies at Harvard University. He is also the Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Givens earned his PhD in African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and is currently completing his first book entitled, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching. Dr. Joshua Bennett is the Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth. He is the author of three books of poetry and prose: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016)—winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award—Owed (Penguin, 2020), and Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard University Press, 2020), which was the winner of the 2019 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize. He earned his PhD in English from Princeton University. His first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf.

Notes

1 Zora Neale Hurston, “Letter from Zora Neale Hurston to W. E. B. Du Bois, June 11, 1945,” June 11, 1945, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers MS 312, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

2 Hortense J. Spillers, “Fabrics of History: Essays on the Black Sermon” (Dissertation, Brandeis University, 1974), 312.

3 "Black Studies is revolutionary in its political and historical origins and intellectual impulses. To paraphrase C.L.R. James, who insisted that Black Studies was the study of Western Civilization, Black Studies is a critique of Western Civilization." Internationalist 360°, “Capitalism, Marxism, and the Black Radical Tradition: An Interview with Cedric Robinson,” REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGIC STUDIES (blog), June 6, 2016, https://revolutionarystrategicstudies.wordpress.com/2016/06/06/capitalism-marxism-and-the-black-radical-tradition-an-interview-with-cedric-robinson/; Robinson makes a similar claim about black radicalism: Cedric J. Robinson and Robin D. G. Kelley, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 73.

4 Quote taken from Hortense J. Spillers “A Moment of Protest Becomes a Curricular Object,” included in this issue.

5 See article 4 section “d” of ANA constitution: American Negro Academy. The American Negro Academy organizational constitution, ca. 1900. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

6 Keith D. Leonard, “First Questions: The Mission of Africana Studies: An Interview with Hortense Spillers,” Callaloo 30, no. 4 (2007): 1054–68.